Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott

the English social structure is a very serious matter. Transporting convicts may be a convenient plot device, mirroring a historical practice that was a handy way of getting rid of social deviants, but as Dickens’s oeuvre shows, the transported convict as represented in literature was complicated and diverse enough to figure crucial social dilemmas and imagine solutions for them. The issues that Dickens’s various works raise are present in a variety of other literary texts of the era, which I explore in the remaining chapters.

      TWO

      Englishness and the Working Class in Transportation Broadsides

      Come all young men of learning a warning take by me,

      I’d have you quit night walking and shun bad company,

      I’d have you quit night walking or else you’ll rue the day

      When you are transported and going to Botany Bay.

      THE speaker of this ballad (circa 1828) laments the fact that though he was born of “honest parents,” he became “a roving blade” and has been convicted of an unspecified crime for which he has been sentenced to “Botany Bay,” the popular name for nineteenth-century Australia (H. Anderson, 62). Although he addresses his audience as “young men of learning,” the rest of the ballad implies that he, as is conventional in the broadside form, is a working-class apprentice gone astray. While nonfictional accounts of the young colony of New South Wales began to be published in England almost as soon as the First Fleet arrived there in 1788, these were written by people with at least a middle-class education, whereas the vast majority of the convicted felons who were transported came from the working classes.¹ Because books and newspapers were expensive and the level of literacy among working-class people varied, not many of them would have had access to such accounts of the new colonies. A few descriptions, mostly borrowed from the writings of the officers who accompanied the First Fleet, were published in cheap chapbook form, while occasional letters from convicts to their families were printed and distributed, and of course there were unpublished letters plus word-of-mouth reports from convicts or soldiers who did return.² But none of these were broadly disseminated among working-class people as the convict broadsides were.

      I take up the subject of the ephemeral literary form known as the broadside next for two reasons. One is that the broadside is arguably the first fiction published about convicts transported to Australia. The other is that this street literature was produced primarily for the working classes in both London and the provinces of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales (though I focus on broadsides published in London). While Dickens’s novel Great Expectations is a highly canonical text with hundreds of critical interpretations and his journal Household Words is drawing increasing commentary, few people have noticed the important form of the broadside, especially the convict broadside, of which the epigraph to this chapter is an example. Yet the convict broadside helped define English national identity and its relation to social class by claiming the antipodal continent as a defining Other of England, while at the same time representing it as only a blank space that could not be imagined by English people, especially the working classes from which most of the transported convicts came. That is, the broadside was a literary-figural form that did not—and was not intended to—convey information, though it could have a definite ideological message.

      Because broadsides were printed on cheap and flimsy paper, relatively few of them have survived, but of the thousands of different broadsides and ballad sheets published and distributed in the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain, there are over 140 extant that directly address convict transportation.³ These broadsides, which circulated widely in the streets of urban centers and in the rural districts as well, are among the few means we have to guess how working-class people in England imagined the newly discovered continent of Australia and the role this played in their conception of their own place as English national subjects. The broadsides demonstrate that English working-class people in the first half of the nineteenth century were developing a sense of themselves as part of the nation by imagining the new Australian colonies as an othered or antipodal space that defined England. But Australia, though called up as an imaginary place, proved to be unrepresentable.

      Broadside is a printers’ term that means there is print on one side of a folio-sized sheet. Broadsides could be sold as one large sheet, which is what is usually meant when the term is used. They could also be printed horizontally with one-column ballads that were cut up and sold, usually in groups of two; the term for this is slip-sheet. The broadsides and slip-sheet ballads were sometimes collected by middle-class readers and pasted into scrapbooks, which is the primary reason that many of them are still available. My work would have been impossible without such collectors, both those of the nineteenth century and more-recent ones; however, all of the readings of the broadsides and ballads I offer here are my own.⁴

      The broadsides that I am discussing were published at a moment—roughly 1790 to 1860—in between primarily oral folk ballads and cheap commercial literature such as penny fiction and the penny press. Broadsides of many sorts had been printed since the sixteenth century and were read by all classes of people, but when a steep tax on newspapers was instituted in 1712, the broadsides, which were not subject to the tax, became almost the only source of printed news and entertainment for many in the working classes (Collison, 9). Further, with the advent of the iron-frame press, patented in 1800, any journeyman printer could buy a press for thirty pounds and set himself up as a publisher (L. James, 23). The publication and sale of broadsides, which sold for a penny or halfpenny, exploded. By the beginning of the nineteenth century there were seventy-five printers selling broadsides in London alone, with many in other cities and towns as well (Vicinus, 9). The number of broadsides produced increased over the next fifty years; one execution broadside from the late 1840s reportedly sold two and a half million copies, with others routinely selling in the thousands and tens of thousands weekly—astounding numbers for nineteenth-century publishing, in which well-known novels were issued in editions of only five hundred or a thousand and even the circulation numbers of the most popular newspapers were less than two hundred thousand (Webb, 31; Coggeshall, 87–89). The popularity of the broadsides gradually faded beginning at midcentury with a reduction in the tax duties and new technological developments, including the emergence of the huge steam presses that made newspapers and books more affordable to all classes. Broadsides were printed throughout the nineteenth century, but their heyday coincided roughly with the years during which the English government was transporting many of its felons to Australia. These were also the years during which England was changing from a largely rural agricultural economy to an urbanized industrial one, causing major social transformation, especially for the working classes.⁵